THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

against Us.” It is self-evident, is it not?Thus it came to pass that Israel is the Shoah’s only legitimate daughter. One part ofthe argument is directed at us: Nothing serves better as a common denominator tounite the people than an external enemy. And because one of the Shoah’s legacies isthe vow “Never Again,” “No more Auschwitz,” as Barak concluded his speech atthe death camp, we could always be recruited to fight any enemy, real or imagined.Always, to the end of time, as enemies do not end, they only alternate. The other partof the argument that Israel is the daughter of the Shoah is directed outward, both tothe Jews of the Diaspora and the non-Jews in the world. Its essence is an endlessextortion by emotional manipulation that is self-replenishing.The Israelis repeatedly elect generals and security officials to lead us. Is this meantto deter the Arab enemy or to pacify ourselves? Clearly it is to allay our built-in fearsand cover for our weaknesses. The leadership of generals serves today as the bestresponse against the Jewish weakness during the European destruction andthroughout Jewish history. My late father once described his boss, Yitzhak Rabin,general, ambassador, minister, and prime minister, as a “retroactive activist.” Soindeed we all are. We choose retroactive leadership, as most of our lives and energyare derived from a past which we haunt again and again. We do not see a future,hence we have no need for a leadership for the future.Unfortunately, the few times we chose civilian leaders, they were assimilated intothe patterns of the past and did not succeed in changing them. The late Levi Eshkolled Israel in the Six-Day War, simultaneously the most successful and most damagingwar in our history. Ehud Olmert and Amir Peretz, as prime minister and defenseminister respectively, acted early in their terms as phobia-ridden arch-generals,sending the IDF to fight the second Lebanon War, and did not act like reasonablecivilians, as they should have. Perhaps one day we will rid ourselves of the constantparanoia and the troops will return to their barracks, as Herzl envisioned, and thegenerals will not fill the halls of power. When this happens, civil leadership will lookto the future, not to past traumas and threats, and we will be rid of anti-pogrom andanti-Shoah walls and minefields.The same tantalizing emotions were repeated in the 1990s. I was then deeplyinvolved in the struggle to repatriate Jewish property and the dormant Jewishaccounts in Swiss banks held since the Shoah. As chairman of the Jewish Agencyand member of the myriad committees and organizations, I received periodic reports